Nvidia render farms vulnerable to attack

Render farms based on Nvidia cards and Mental Ray rendering software could be open to attack, new research suggests. Render farms have been in use with major and even relatively small video outfits for year, and so has Mental Ray, which had a nasty habit of killing 3DS Max back in the day.

Mental Ray farms, with arrays of Quadro cards, are used in other industries as well, by the likes of Honda, Airbus, BMW, Boeing and others. The latest incarnation of Mental Ray has an unpatched vulnerability that allows attackers to seize control of render farms by injecting a malicious remote library, SC Magazine reports.

In theory it could be possible to harness the immense parallel computing power of such farms for password cracking or cryptocurrency mining, although Radeons tend to be better when it comes to mining.

The vulnerability was identified by security firm Revuln. Nvidia is investigating the claims.